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Halloween Gift

Halloween isn’t exactly the biggest holiday in creation — if you raid with primarily 16-24 year olds, it might not even make a dint in your evening plans; however, if you raid with people with little kids at home, or a gregarious neighborhood tradition, a weekend Halloween might knock out 25 mans for the weekend, leaving you stranded wondering “What to do?”

Last night was one of those for PK. With no hope of conning 13-15 other people into joining us we slimmed down to 10 players and looked at what to take down. First on the list was ToC-10 — good practice, and a quick easy raid. Things went really well, and with a little extra work Salt & Pepper would have been ours! After that we trekked over to Ony-10 and did another quick treasure grab. Then we had to decide — what to do? By this time it is 9:30 server and our raids usually end at 10:30. Our main tank has an obligation (spouses like to be picked up from work it seems) at 10:30, leaving us with either only an hour, or with a semi-extended break with nothing to do.

For the hell of it, we decide to work on The Undying in Naxxramas. Whenever someone goes squish, the raid will be done for the evening. If you haven’t completed it yet, or missed Naxx in current progression, it requires that every player in the raid live on every single boss in the instance within one lockout period. Ulduar’s rules are different, allowing you to keep your raid alive per boss and mixing and matching between lockout periods.

We decided on the hard boss first strategy — Construct –> Plague –> Military –> Spider. Things went smoothly through construct. Heigan was easily vanguished in plague wing, and then one of our tanks had to /afk to get the wife. The raid sits around and has an easy-going conversation while we await his return — then he d/c’s because he’s been afk so long… no problem, he’ll be back soon, right? Finally, we decide to move on without him — someone has checked, and the only requirement is to be a current member of the raid when KT goes down where no one has died — you don’t actually have to be present for every boss kill.

And that ladies and gents, was the highlight of the drama for the night 😛 Most groups that I’ve been attempting Undying with absolutely crack when we go to face KT. Every time a void area spawns, 4 people are yelling at you to move. When iceblocks occur, same thing. You become a jittery mass of nerves, wondering who is going to yell at you next — and honestly, you can’t help it that he targeted you to be a big block of ice, right? right???

However, not a whisper from this group. If someone was targeted, the raid leader just said their name — no panic, no frantic instructions, just a general raid announcement. When the adds spawned, the off tank identified his taunt target and smoothly brought him over to the boss, switched back to kitty, and all was well. And the night ended with that wonderful achievement sound and we all flashed green — The Undying!

Not every day that your 25-man raid night turns into such a great 10-man success — You can all laugh at my guild lust now ^^